4 ms·

Adobe has probably made billions of dollars on Photoshop, and has thousands of people working on improving interaction with a regular grid of color values. Thi

by ynniv 16y ago

Adobe has probably made billions of dollars on Photoshop, and has thousands of people working on improving interaction with a regular grid of color values. This is a high profit, low complexity situation. Most developers are not willing to spend $700 on an editor, and the gamut of programming language source code syntaxes is too broad for a single editor to work uniformly across them. But really, comparing anything to Photoshop is silly. Some music sequencing programs will in fact allow you to create measures with the wrong number of beats, and have annoying, unproductive interfaces. Premiere is actually really annoying to work with, which sent a lot of people over to Final Cut. Even extremely similar programs like Adobe Illustrator are fraught with miserable design and crappy storage formats. The OP has valid points, but these apply to most software, and not just IDE's.

jasonkester 16y ago
I'd spend $700 on a truly good IDE, and so should any programmer capable of doing simple arithmetic. Calculate how much more productive you can be using the best tools available, then figure out how many hours at your bill rate it will take to make back that investment. For something like IntelliJ ($$$, but awesome) versus Eclipse (free, but crap), most people will find that they break even in less than a week. Assuming you expect your programming career to be longer than that, it's not a tough decision to make.
- ynniv 16y ago
  A few programmers will pay a lot of money, but most programmers seem to be uninterested in paying more than $70. Compared this to photographers, who will almost universally pay $700. The market is much larger.
  - adbachman 16y ago
    I worked for a large manufacturing / consumer product company as a .NET developer and the four people on my team all had top level MSDN subscriptions. ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx ) I think the number I heard for our team, just MSDN subscriptions, was around $25000 a year.
    - ynniv 16y ago
      That's only like 35 copies of Photoshop. Not to downplay the money you spent, but the market for Visual Studio is smaller than Photoshop. Also, the customer of Visual Studio is team leads and management, not actual users. This might explain why more expensive VS packages emphasize collaboration and team features.
      - jasonkester 16y ago
        VS.NET is something of a special case, since Microsoft would like nothing more than to give it away for free. They don't, because if they did it would make toolmakers like ReSharper and CodeSmith seem unjustifiably expensive. If you're a small shop, you can get in thru BizSpark and get a pack of MSDN licenses big enough for your whole team for something like $400, all in. So sure, you can pay $2500/copy retail if you're big enough to do so. Or if you're small, you can pay peanuts. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they go out of their way to take care of their developers.
        ynniv 16y ago
        Another great reason why selling a premium IDE is difficult.

by ynniv 16y ago

jasonkester 16y ago

I'd spend $700 on a truly good IDE, and so should any programmer capable of doing simple arithmetic. Calculate how much more productive you can be using the best tools available, then figure out how many hours at your bill rate it will take to make back that investment. For something like IntelliJ ($$$, but awesome) versus Eclipse (free, but crap), most people will find that they break even in less than a week. Assuming you expect your programming career to be longer than that, it's not a tough decision to make.

ynniv 16y ago
A few programmers will pay a lot of money, but most programmers seem to be uninterested in paying more than $70. Compared this to photographers, who will almost universally pay $700. The market is much larger.
- adbachman 16y ago
  I worked for a large manufacturing / consumer product company as a .NET developer and the four people on my team all had top level MSDN subscriptions. ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy.aspx ) I think the number I heard for our team, just MSDN subscriptions, was around $25000 a year.
  - ynniv 16y ago
    That's only like 35 copies of Photoshop. Not to downplay the money you spent, but the market for Visual Studio is smaller than Photoshop. Also, the customer of Visual Studio is team leads and management, not actual users. This might explain why more expensive VS packages emphasize collaboration and team features.
    - jasonkester 16y ago
      VS.NET is something of a special case, since Microsoft would like nothing more than to give it away for free. They don't, because if they did it would make toolmakers like ReSharper and CodeSmith seem unjustifiably expensive. If you're a small shop, you can get in thru BizSpark and get a pack of MSDN licenses big enough for your whole team for something like $400, all in. So sure, you can pay $2500/copy retail if you're big enough to do so. Or if you're small, you can pay peanuts. Say what you want about Microsoft, but they go out of their way to take care of their developers.
      - ynniv 16y ago
        Another great reason why selling a premium IDE is difficult.